José Torres-Tama

These mixed media works-on-paper are my creative acts of resistance to a culture that thrives on amnesia, and looks to erase my immigrant people from our rightful place in history. In the New Orleans 2018 Tricentennial celebrations, the most neglected truth was the immense contribution Latin American immigrants have made to our epic reconstruction in the 15 years plus post-Katrina. “New Orleans & the World 1718 – 2018” was the official anthology published by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH), a state arts agency, and its white scholars brutally disappeared our Latin American immigrants from their post-storm narratives—as if we did not even exist.

This body of work honors the forgotten immigrants who have resurrected New Orleans from its critical condition in the immediate years after the 2005 flood. They represent a pictorial chronicle and visual arts documentation that immigrants have aided the rebirth of the “new” New Orleans. Thousands of immigrants have given of their blood, labor, and love to rebuild a city that has exploited their labor and ignored their human suffering.

My drawings exemplify a divine fusion between figurative pictorial narratives, socially conscious content, and pushes visual borders with mixed media elements of magnet letters on steel plates, moving operated second-hand clocks, and mounted on wood materials used in the reconstruction of houses.

The piece titled “Guadalupe Mourns the Death of Immigrant Child in ICE Detention” honors and remembers the death of Felipe Alonzo Gomez, an eight-years young Nicaraguan baby boy who died of criminal negligence in one of the many border concentration camps at the Rio Grande Border. This child perished under Zero Tolerance Policy ushered in by the previous brutal administration run by the deposed “Hater-in-Chief”. Is this what “Makes America Great?”

Felipe died on Xmas Eve in December of 2018, and as a father, I was shaken to my core. This is my way to transform that trauma into a pictorial narrative with the iconic “Guadalupe Mother” hovering over the body of a dead immigrant child while shadowy blue-colored ICE Agents look on coldly. It was finished in a recent four-month Joan Mitchell Center artist-in-residency program in New Orleans   

These figurative works celebrate the humanity of my immigrant people who have been strategically and divisively dehumanized as “illegal aliens” by political zealots. My work challenges the raging anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States of Amnesia, a system that seduces you to forget it readily exploits the labor of the same immigrants it vilifies.

As an Ecuadorian-born immigrant, I hold steadfast to a belief that artists can serve as the conscience of our times. I cannot bask in a privilege that I am not afforded to make “art for art’s sake” because the attacks on my brown Mestizo body and immigrant community are far from abstract. I am an interdisciplinary artist of color dedicated to social justice, and these pieces are from a series called New Works from Another Era of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria.

“No Human Being Is Illegal” in a capitalist empire built of stolen lands of indigenous people and a “white supremacist” belief system.

—José Torres-Tama

April 2021